The usefulness of Tether is to give liquidity to the exchanges, not to the consumer. Bitmex has a recent study on their cash and everything leads one to believe that they have the reserves they claim to own. This is a guarantee for the exchanges that use this product.
There are no guarantees for the consumer. Or how to directly withdraw this resource in your local currency. it would depend on each exchange accepting this conversion.
But of course there are several opinions on the possibilities of Tether have been used to manipulate the volume and that is why several alternatives have appeared in recent months.
https://blog.bitmex.com/tether/Conclusion
History has shown that centralised systems with certain characteristics (censorship resistance or anonymous transactions) tend to get shut down by the authorities. Tether shares some of the same characteristics as these extinguished services so it may also attract criminals and ultimately suffer the same fate.
In our view, Tether has two choices:
Reform the system to include KYC/AML procedures that allow the operator to easily block transactions or freeze funds. In order to do this, Tether may need to fundamentally change its technological architecture and perhaps leave the public blockchains. Essentially, Tether would just be turning into a traditional (or full-reserve) bank.
Continue as is and risk being be shut down by the authorities at some point.
If Tether is shut down, there is a risk that some users may lose access to their funds, perhaps temporarily. We do not recommend holding Tether for the long term, but not for the reasons some of the sceptics typically pronounce. We think that criminal usage of Tether is likely to be relatively low because of the use of Tether for financial speculation, which is probably the system’s dominant use case. Furthermore, we have not found any evidence of criminals using Tether to launder funds. As it stands, we think an imminent shutdown is unlikely.
The case studies above illustrate the two angles to censorship resistance (individual transactions and the system as a whole) and what distributed crypto tokens need to achieve in order to be sustainable in the long run. If a payment system cannot block transactions, doesn’t require permission for use, or offers anonymous use, it will probably eventually be shut down. This could be just as true for systems like Tether and Ripple as it was for Liberty Reserve, E-gold, and DigiCash. A potential way around this is to try to build a distributed system that cannot be shut down (i.e., censorship resistance for the system as a whole). Whether Bitcoin or other proof-of-work-based systems can achieve this is still unproven, in our view.
